Microsoft pushes Spartan to Windows 10 preview users

Since the release of build 10041 for PCs we’ve continued to make steady progress, and as I said in the blog post with that one we’re working to bring you builds to the Fast ring faster than before. Builds last week were BIG ones for us as well, since “Project Spartan” was integrated into our flighting branch for the first time. That’s right, this means that today’s release includes the new Project Spartan browser and you’ll get to use it for the first time on PCs as it begins to show up across the Windows 10 device family.

I downloaded the latest W10 build. Project Spartan looks interesting. It’s quite the change for Microsoft and, so far, looks nothing like IE. The problem that I see is that long time IE users, the ones that don’t want to even try Chrome or Firefox, won’t rush to use Spartan, but likely will warm to it and it’s leaner look and feel once they begin to use it. I use Chrome. Spartan might be as good as Chrome, maybe better. But, will Microsoft ever be able to patch its’ inevitable vulnerabilities as fast as Chrome is patched? I doubt it.

They probably will. Spartan will be updated through the store because it is a universal app so they could roll out daily updates if they wanted and everyone (that is having auto-update-from-store enabled) would have the latest version the next day.

There is not going to be a “Spartan 6” that everyone will stay stuck on for years because there is no more development or because it is required for legacy sites. That role is purely for IE11.

And I do believe that Microsoft will be able to patch vulnerabilities in Spartan much quicker exactly because it doesn’t have to support any legacy. Having everyone on the latest and greatest is basically the reason Spartan exists

I also underrate it because so many people are still running old, under-featured versions of it and because it’s a pain in the ass to download and fire up modern.ie VMs to test it when all the other browsers I need to test my creations against run on my OS natively.